Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
“Throwing the dice” probably provides a sense of control (or at least a putting of some of one’s physical and emotional effort into producing the outcome). That can be a good thing when conducting the simulation, but so can having the results delivered from the “black box” — being physically/emotionally “engaged” can make the simulation more useful for realistic training and planning, as can having the results delivered from outside the participants’ immediate environment. It’s good to have the simulations create somewhat realistic operating environments that reflect the kinds of environments in which decisions and plans are made by the various participants in the simulations (decisions made during a meeting of the UN Security Council, decisions made in the Oval Office, planning conducted at a country desk, planning conducted at a war table, decisions made from the conning tower of a ship, …). The article did a very nice job of describing the environments involved with the playing of the described wargame (including with pictures).
Interesting. I have some questions.
The impression I got from the article is that the group were developing the rules using a kind of informal prototyping approach. Do you know if they have formalised it to the extent of documenting the rules or is still in people’s heads?
Is it possible to get an idea of the data they are using, (e.g. do they have detailed engagement ranges for various weapons, what unit types are they using)?
Are they intending to cover the full multi-domain battlefield (i.e. cyber warfare, space, autonomous and semi-autonomous drones)?
What level of support is there from senior people, or is this a group of analysts?
It would be good to get an update later on how it was progressing?